


sea and sky

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, F/F, Minor pining, Mythology - Freeform, moongoddess!Arwen, mostly just fluff, tidalgoddess!Tauriel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-17 01:38:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11265276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: In which two goddesses chase each other around the earth in the search for something new, and learn something about themselves in the process.





	sea and sky

**Author's Note:**

> Second story for the Hobbit Big Bang '17.
> 
> Art by the fantastic [rutobuka](http://rutobuka2.tumblr.com/post/162096090919/art-for-northerntrashs-sea-and-sky-the) and the incredible [ mithrilbikini!](http://mithrilbikini.tumblr.com/post/162099930517/artwork-for-northerntrashs-gorgeous)! Thank you so much guys!

Have you ever stood at the line of the shore and wondered at the way that the ocean moves, backwards and forwards? Have you ever watched the moon ghost a course across the sky and stared in awe at the silver glow of it? Have you ever asked yourself what makes these things move, what guides the patterns that they make across your life?

The world is shaped by forces beyond the understanding of man: there is a reason behind the way that things work, a reason that was never meant to be ours, passed down in part in stories, the rest taken back to the earth or sky or sea, wherever it belongs. Everything happens for a reason: just because you do not know the reason yourself, does not meant that it isn’t there, hidden away somewhere beyond the understanding of man. Why do the mountains grow, the winds blow, why do the deep waters stay as cold as they do? Who formed the ice sheets, and why did they want to do so? Why did the stars tell stories to us long before we could understand them, why do trees gather together in the forests as if lonely, why does honey drip so slowly from a spoon, as if it is afraid to fall?

There is a story to be told about everything that you see, or touch or feel, everything that you take for granted. Some of those stories are tales of fear, others are ones of loss and grief and loneliness. But sometimes they are about finding who you are, about discovering all that you can achieve, about becoming something that you were always meant to be.

This is one of those stories.

And it’s a story about love, too.

 

* * *

 

Tauriel is the tide, as ever changing as any immortal can be.

She moves, backwards and forwards, shoots the arrows of the waves through the water, makes them ebb and flow at her command, and they do move at her power, only hers. All gods must have a purpose, she knows this as they all know it, and she likes hers, which is more than some gods can say – she has heard many stories, over the long years, of gods born to tasks that they hate, who long to do something different, who cannot escape the powers that they have been given, who grow to despise that which they must inevitably be. Those are the gods who rise and fall, who exceed their purpose, who find themselves, eventually, at the end of all their days, far sooner than they were meant to. But she has never felt that way, and for this she feels blessed. The water has always felt right, around her: maybe that is because she was born in it, maybe because she was born _to_ it, but there is a rhythm and a cadence to the ocean that seems to fit every part of herself.

More than that, even – it fills her, gives her a sense of completion, brings together all the strange and twisting parts of herself that she does not understand and gives her purpose, and reason, and meaning. She will always love the sea for that, will never resent it, even if sometimes she stands on the shore and wishes that she could step beyond the caress of the water to see what lies beyond the sand dunes, beyond the slope of the beaches that she may never crest. The water whispers to her sometimes, of the mountains that it has seen, the trees, the flowers, of all that it has seen as it has passed around the earth, and she wonders what it would be like to see them for herself, though she knows that that will never happen, no matter how much she dreams. She is fixed to the ocean, must always touch the water, cannot leave this vast expanse that she thinks of as home, and sometimes she longs for something else, even if she does not need anything more.

But she does not long for that often, and it doesn’t hurt all that much. After all, the sea has a thousand secrets that she still has not uncovered, and it will always have more that she has not seen, for it is constantly changing. She may never leave the touch of the water, but why grieve over that when the seas are a miracle in and of themselves? There is much in its uncharted depths that others will never see, never know and never feel, and she finds joy in haunting the sunken ships, the great chasms of the trenches, the myriad of creatures who are just like her, who cannot leave the water.

The sea moves around her, always, her hair the tangled colour of the deep-sea urchins, the sunset over the surface of the water – a red-orange that moves around her in the water, caressing her shoulders. She found a mirror once, in a sunken ship, the glass cracked and spotted from its slow descent to the sea-bed. She had stared in bewilderment at the wild, fair creature reflected back at her, wondering how she had gone so long without understanding the narrow line of her nose, the gentle movement of the edges of her throat-gills, the contrast between the soft curves of her stomach and the hard lines of the muscles of her shoulders and arms, her legs, ever-strong from swimming.

Her skin is freckled from the sun that always finds her when she follows the water to the coast line, when the darkness of the deep water turns to a fair and fine blue, when she can feel the pale sand or the dark stones of the shore beneath her ever-dancing feet. Her skin is tinged with the blue of the sea, even when she pulls her body above the surface – it is a pale and pastel colour, matching well with the navy of her freckles. When the sunlight comes through the waves she is pebble-dashed in all the colours of light and water, and she laughs to see herself then, the long lines of her skin stretched out around her as she moves, water swirling in eddies around her, helpless in the face of her joy.

Thranduil shakes his head at her, when their paths cross: she knows that he thinks her young and foolish, and she is not offended, for she knows in many ways that she is. She is a new god, as gods go: she does not remember the time before the earth, when all was black and formless, without time or reason. She came after the time when the Gods shaped this land, when their ire formed the mountains and their tears pooled to make the oceans; she has only heard the stories of how gentle hands made the grass grow in the dunes along the coast, how others full of rage beat at the earth until it crumbled into the sand and pebbles that fell in the end to the edges of the land. When she woke to feel the sea around her, the sea-birds were already calling far above, the sea was already living with the creatures that made it their home.  She did not know the horrors of the wars that had been before; she had been born to a world of peace, a world in which there was nothing to be afraid. She knows the tales, and she can imagine the horrors that the older gods must have faced, but in her heart she will never truly understand.

She has faced her own battles, but they are of a different sort.

She has a place in the great and immeasurable oceans, as small and insignificant as it might be compared to some of the others that run this realm. She is not the only God, far from it – there is Oropher, who rules the deep-depths from his castle made of coral; Legolas, who makes the storms that wreak havoc on the sailors above; Thranduil, who creates the currents that move the deep waters; ### who is charged with the care of the inlets that bring the fresh water to join the sea; ### who spends their time making the sea-plants grow; Radagast, who brings life to the creatures of the sea, and cares for them during their short lives.

She fits here, amongst them, though she rarely speaks to them. She does not need to, in order to perform her task – to bring the tide to the land and then home again. She is not fixed to one place, to one part of the great and beautiful world – she can go wherever she likes, as long as the tide moves enough to keep everything healthy. But that means too that she rarely finds time to run into the other gods of the water, rarely sees them for more than a fleeting moment here and there. She doesn’t mind that, not really – she has never found grief in solitude, and her work keeps her busy, for she brings the tide in and out again twice daily, all around the world.

And she does not need to do that as often as she does, if she is being honest with herself. Once or twice a week would suffice to keep things moving and healthy, to keep things as they should be. When she learnt the task that had been allotted to her, in the instinctive and internal way that gods do, she had known that. More frequent tides do nothing to harm, but they do nothing to help either, and when the other gods ask her why she spends so much time in the labour of her task, she simply shrugs, and makes some joke about how it is always better to keep busy.

That isn’t true.

Neither is it true that her movements around the ocean are completely at random, though she knows the rest believe that she moves this way because she is flighty, because she is trying to stop herself growing bored at her endless task. They laugh behind their hands at her youthful foolishness, seeing no logic or pattern to her movements, thinking her thoughtless, with an irrationality that one day, eventually, she might outgrow.

But that isn’t true, either.

She has told no one the real reason for her movements, not even Legolas, who is possibly the closest thing to a friend that she has. She doesn’t want anyone to know, not because she thinks that they will laugh, not because she does not trust them with the knowledge, but simply because it is the only thing that she has that feels like it is truly hers, and not a part of the ocean’s, and a part of everyone else within in. There is more to her than the other gods realise, she thinks: she has never let them see.

She follows the moon.

It has always been there, for as long as she can remember – always at night, of course, but if she chases it around the globe then she can catch glimpses of it throughout the day, too. It is paler then, a fain curve against the blue of the sky, but it is there, none the less. There is something beautiful about the curve of it, about the way that it moves across the curve of the sky, about the way that it lights up the sky at night, far brighter than any of the stars, outshining everything else in the cool breeze of the evening. Tauriel likes to go to shore, likes to bring the tide in so often so that she can lie on the sand, the water covering her legs like a blanket. From there she can stare up at the moon without it being distorted by the movement of the water, can trace its movement with her fingertip, can smile as the light turns her blue skin to silver and feel as if the moon were smiling at her, too.

She has been in love with the moon since the first moment she drew breath, in the shallows of the Aegean, and saw it shining down, as if it was watching her, only her. There is something that connects the two of them, she thinks, something real and profound that she cannot really explain. There are no words for it, but it is real, she is sure of it.

Tauriel knows there is a goddess of the moon, but she doesn’t know anything more than that – even that information was only gleaned in passing, from a river spirit who was washed out to sea. She had babbled away about all sorts of things as Tauriel had carried her gently back to the shore where she might find her way home again. In fact in many ways she tried not to listen, and refused to ask questions, even though the young spirit clearly wanted her to – if she were to learn more about the goddess, at any point, she would not want it to be a second-hand thing. It doesn’t feel right to her, somehow. She wants to learn herself, as and when it is time – and she knows, or rather, she believes, that one day that time will come.

And so she doesn’t know the name of the goddess, doesn’t know what she looks like nor what her temperament may be, but she knows her instinctively the day she brings the tide to the shore and finds herself no longer alone.

The Goddess on the beach is tall and beautiful in the cold and distant way that the stars are, her skin shining silver-gold, a constant play of light and shadows. Her hair is dark and as fine as silk, tumbling around a face that has turned towards Tauriel, expectantly. She has been waiting, Tauriel realises, and the fact that she could only have been waiting for Tauriel makes something strange and warm twist in her chest.

“Hello,” she says, still waist-deep in the water, her head turned to one side as she takes in the sight of the moon.

 

* * *

 

Arwen is transitionary too, but of a different sort.

She moves slowly around the sky, but only in a fixed pattern, following a course that was set out for her long ago, pulling the great and glowing orb of the moon in her wake. That light defines her, silver and sparse: it spills from her fingertips, runs through her hair, has been a part of her for as long as she has drawn metaphorical breath. But though she moves endlessly she finds little freedom in it, for she cannot alter her pattern, cannot shift the careful orbit of the moon, for to do so would be to destroy the order of the skies, and oh, as all things of beauty are, the sky is vulnerable to change. That is why the immortals never change, she thinks, why gods remain the same for decades, centuries, millennia: they fear that, if they change, they will lose that which makes them so very special.

That which makes them gods.

She enjoys it, more or less. There is a pleasure to be found in the routine, and whilst the passage may be a dull one, the sights are anything but. As she circumnavigates the globe of the earth she can see every constellation in the sky, all the stories written across the vastness of the dark around her, and when she chooses to turn her eyes from the infinite she too can watch all that is spread out beneath her.

The stars bore her quickly: they chatter endlessly, a noiseless cacophony that has no limit, and they tell the same stories, over and over again. They are great stories, true: heroes and mighty deeds and the creatures that have left this world now, but there is only so many times Arwen can listen to them before she must seek entertainment elsewhere, and the land is as great a place as any to look for it. It makes her long for it, for that which she has never touched: the grass and the trees and the gentle curls of clouds that move across its face in a constantly changing pattern. She sees the animals and the men and the ways in which they are different and similar too; she watches their stories as if they were paintings upon a vase and she laughs with them, cries with them, feels their joys and their sorrows as if they were her own.

She wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to walk amongst them, to not only watch, but be a part of it all. Would they see her, would they know her, or would she pass unremarked upon through the lands of beasts and birds and man and fish – just another creature amongst the millions living on the earth. She thinks that she would like to know.

Arwen was born in the sky, suspended in the stars. It was their light that she had seen first, filling her eyes with a shining brightness that has never left her. Her earliest memory is her father’s eyes, staring at her with love and a hopelessness that has never quite faded. There is much that she does not know: once the moon belonged to her mother, but her father won’t tell her where she has gone. She knows that there were wars that shaped the skies, wars that went on for as long as the ones that formed the earth. They think she is too naive to know about it all, a vessel of innocence that they cannot pollute with the knowledge of what has come before, but the far-off stars whisper the stories and she can always hear them, no matter how far away her father slings them. The moon is beautiful: it is a symbol of hope in the darkest of nights to those who look up and find their face cast in the silver of its glory. But it is also a cold light, which comes with no warmth. She takes it into herself greedily, always hoping that it might one day become warm.

She wonders if one day her mother simply grew too sad to carry on: if maybe the coldness of it all just became too much for her to bear. She has a feeling that the story is a lot more tragic than that, but not even the stars will her tell it.

The moon is a burden and a gift, she thinks as she moves it. It keeps her ever moving, but never changing, shackles her to the velvet of the sky. She keeps it on its course, and she feeds her light into it, keeping it as bright as it should be. The light comes to her from Galadriel, of course, the golden lady of the sun: it is through her grace that all the celestial creatures of the sky continue in their work, but the light is as much a part of Arwen as well. It is her father who taught her that, as his nimble hands were hard at work lassoing the stars into constellations. There are others too, who she has known for as long as she can remember: ###, in charge of the sky writ at large; ###, whose fingertips prick the sky and bring the stars into being; ###, who draws the stars down to earth, who designs the movement of the falling stars.

They look like her, apart from Galadriel: she is gold and light and joy, her skin the palest white flaring constantly with moving colours, her hair alive in solar flares. She is special though, and she rules over the rest of them, the solar consort, the bodies of the sky. They, her children, have skin that flickers silver with their own light, and gold too with Galadriel’s; their hair is dark and shining with the starlight that is always with them; their movements are fluid and strong, but there is something oddly static about the way they move too, how they blink slowly, unused to too much light at any one time.

She could leave the moon; she knows this.

Not indefinitely, of course. She would have to brush it to keep it moving, but she does not have to sit on her pale throne here in the skies to do that, surrounded by the cold, the endless talking and the breathless silence, the darkness, the bright lights, everything a harsh contrast but never really changing. She could do it from the surface of the earth – she knows that, even though the older gods have tried desperately to stop her from realising it. It is instinctive, though – it cannot be unknown any more than she can forget her own name. She is the moon, and the moon will continue to move no matter where she is, as long as she lives still.

But she doesn’t leave.

There is no real reason for that. Perhaps it is simply that she is too afraid. Maybe her father’s stories of the cruel ways of man have stuck far more than she had really understood. Maybe she is stuck being one thing, and one thing only, and doesn’t know how to be anything else. Maybe it is just too strange a thing to contemplate doing, not in reality: she is a creature of the sky, of effortless weightlessness, and the idea of the world beneath her seems distant, strange.

There is one thing that intrigues her more than any other, when she looks down at that spinning globe of green and blue, and that is the creature who moves the waves. Arwen can’t make much out, whenever she peers down at her – she moves so quickly it is hard to catch sight of her, and the water obscures the details. All Arwen ever really sees is a flicker of red hair, the bright near-orange colour of the darker solar flares, and a glimpse, now and again, of ever-moving limbs. There is a grace to the way that she directs the sea, as though she finds it effortless, as if the water were as much a part of her as that glorious hair is.

She is beautiful – there is no denying that. It doesn’t matter that Arwen can’t see her face, can’t make out much beyond the vague shape of her body. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know the timbre of her voice, nor her opinions, nor her hopes and dreams – though she feels, often quite wistfully, of finding that out. She doesn’t need to know these things to know that the goddess of the tide is beautiful, in her freedom and her joy and the wildness that underpins her every movement – so different, too, from the static mass of the sky.

Over time, as she grows older, she finds herself watching the goddess more and more, rejoicing in the way that she seems to move across the oceans in a way that means she is never quite out of sight, though sometimes she overshoots the curve of the earth, and Arwen must strain to catch up: other times she lags behind, and Arwen slows herself down as much as she can to allow her to appear again. She wishes that she had a name for the goddess, but though she has asked no one is able to tell her. The celestial deities care little for the goings on of earth: the stories only become important to them once they move to the sky. Whilst they are going on, whilst the people and the gods live on the earth, they are out of the sky’s dominion, and out of their interest.

She wants to know her name.

The others can tell this – her father certainly does, and though she knows he does not approve she speaks often to him about this goddess that she watches, brings her up whenever she can, and her father sighs as he throws the stars to wilder and wilder shapes as she laughs, recounting once again the way that she dances.

And Arwen is afraid, yes, but she wants to know, she longs for something different than all that she knows, is desperate to leave the confines of this place – her father knows this, he is not stupid, and he loves her dearly, desperately. Perhaps with too much fear, too, but the love is there, and a parent cannot feel their child’s longing for too long before they must surrender their fear, and let their child go. He tells Arwen this, in the end, tells her that she should go and meet this goddess, should see the world beneath them, if that is what she wants, but it is not enough to convince her – her father has let go of his fear but she finds it harder to do so, for it has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember.

It is Galadriel, in the end, that convinces her. Her Grandmother moves through the sky with a fearlessness that Arwen has always envied, for no one can touch her without being left alight by their own impudence. Her heart is the strongest thing that Arwen could ever imagine their being, for it has been on fire since the sky first came into existence, and when she comes to Arwen one fateful day it is with arms that are full of love, and Arwen knows that they will not hurt her. She sinks into the embrace, and wonders how her Grandmother can be so strong.

“By believing,” Galadriel tells her, with a smile that says she knows exactly what Arwen was thinking.

So she believes that she can, and she goes.

It takes less effort than she had expected: she closes her eyes, and breathes in deep, and she does not let out that breath until she feels, for the first time, the earth beneath her feet. She stumbles at it, for never before has she had to hold up her own weight, but she manages to right herself before she falls over entirely.

The earth is far finer than she expected – sand, actually, that’s the word for it, isn’t it? It is soft and warm still from the evening sunlight, and she sinks into it slightly. She wonders at the sensation, so differently from the nothingness that she is used to. The goddess hasn’t appeared yet, and Arwen takes a moment to look up at the sky, and the distant, darkening blue of it, at the far off sliver of the moon that she can just about see, at the warm light on the horizon that shows where the sun had been just moments before. It is beautiful too, she realises, and she appreciates it in a different way now, seeing it from that angle. But it is nothing compared to the vastness of the ocean before her, the glory of it, the brine in the air, the call of the gulls – it almost overwhelms her, the entire sensory experience of it, for it is so much more than she had imagined, staring down at it from above.

And then the waves lap, just a little, and she knows, instinctively, what it means. Her eyes are fixed on the water, on the way that it moves, directed by a hand that Arwen cannot see but that she knows is there – and then, just as she feels that her heart is about to leap from her chest, the water parts around a mane of glorious hair and a figure emerges, a figure that is already watching her, that knows that she is there.

“Hello,” the goddess of the water says to her, her hair falling around the curve of her shoulders, damp strands sticking to her skin. Arwen wonders, for a moment, if her eyes are as desperate as she feels that they must be – she feels as though she has been waiting for so long, and to be here now feels like a dream that she will wake from. She longs to run, to fling herself into the arms of the other goddess, to feel the touch of her before she wakes, and all this is gone, shatters, fragmented like the meteors that speed past her in the sky.

“Hello,” she replies, and rubs her fingers against her palms in an attempt to calm herself. “My name is Arwen.”

The other goddess’ eyes widen, for a moment, as if she is surprised by this, but there is no curiosity in her gaze, as if she already knew who Arwen was, even if she did not know her name. Perhaps she too has watched Arwen, from the water, wondering who she was, so far away and out of reach.

“I am Tauriel,” she says, with a flicker of a smile.

And there it is, a moment between them, for the exchange of names has a power, and it seems that Tauriel feels it as much as Arwen does, for she takes half a step closer, her eyes warming, and Arwen moves down the beach, legs still unstable, afraid of falling. Now they are closer she can see the blue of Tauriel’s freckles, the green of her eyes, like sea foam.

“You’re the moon,” Tauriel says – she doesn’t ask, as if she already knows, and Arwen wonders if Tauriel has been asking after her or if it is that obvious, just by looking at her – it is clear that Tauriel is a part of the sea, you can see it in her colours and her eyes and the way in which she moves. The ocean is in her eyes, her skin, the way that her hands move to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, as soft and silky as seaweed. 

Is the sky written as clearly on Arwen? Can Tauriel see it in the curve of her cheek, the way the light moves across her skin, the shake in her legs as she struggles to adjust to a world where she stands, rather than floats? She doesn’t know, but she suspects that she is far more obvious than she wants to believe, and she feels a little flustered at that, in the face of this young, calm goddess. Tauriel is still watching her, careful, cautious, and she has not come any closer. Arwen takes a tentative step towards the sea again, breathing sharply when the sand turns abruptly cold beneath her feet: it is damp now from the sea, from Tauriel’s movements.

Tauriel smiles, again, a small and gentle thing.

“Want to see something beautiful?” she asks, and Arwen nods, even though she already is.

 

* * *

 

It took much less time than Tauriel expected to edge Arwen into the water: she had thought that the goddess might be hesitant, but she seemed at ease quickly in its cool embrace, her hands drifting idly through the water, delight etched in evidence on her face.

“It is far colder in the sky,” Arwen told her, in response to Tauriel’s curious expression. “And the water feels closer to the sky, too. Not quite weightless, but something similar.”

It made sense, in a strange and abstract way, and Tauriel didn’t question it, merely taking satisfaction in the knowledge that their worlds are perhaps not as different as she might have imagined them to be. Arwen didn’t panic at the sensation of going beneath the water either, as earth gods tended to do – but then again, Tauriel supposed that there was no air in the sky, and Arwen was as used to not breathing as any fish might be. No gods, of course, need to breathe – Tauriel didn’t need her gills, nor her lungs really – but habit can be a difficult thing to break. Arwen seemed not to care for the break from her norm though, her eyes wide as Tauriel took her hand and pulled her away from the shore, to the darker waters that lightened once more as they chased the sun around the globe.

There had been only one place that she could think of when she had seen the goddess of the moon standing uncertainly on her beach, one place that she valued above all others, and she leads Arwen there without ever having to check her direction, knowing instinctively which way to go.

“Here it is,” she said, after a while. “The place where I was born.”

Stretched before them is a cove of crystal, deep beneath the surface. The rocks had turned crystalline at the moment she had opening her eyes, forming great pillars of shining rock around where she had been lying on a bower of water when she woke, and even now, as she looked at it, she could see how those pillars had leant into her, as if trying to come closer. Not deep enough to hide entirely from the sunlight, it was refracted back and forth in the water from jut to leaning jut of crystal, lighting the small place with a radiance that would never be found anywhere else. Here the sand had turned to gold at the miracle of Tauriel’s birth, and the plants all grew orange, in deference to her hair. Thranduil called this place her alter, but the name had never quite seemed right to her. 

She had only ever called it home, and never before had she led anyone through the still waters of it, past the glittering columns to the small space within, where the plants leant towards her, tangling gently around her legs for comfort.

“Here is where I lay, when I was born,” Tauriel said, quietly, watching Arwen’s expression out of the corner of her eye. “Yet when I opened my eyes, it was not the shimmering stone nor the golden sands nor the singing plants that first caught my attention, but the sight of the moon above me, the waters so still in that moment that I could see you almost clearly, despite the depths. I know not whether the waters paused for that moment so that I might see you, or whether it was just a coincidence of divine importance, yet it happened none the less, and I have been greatful for it ever since, for it gave me in that moment a comfort that I can never explain, to see your light like that, filling me with a warmth and reassurance that I would never have known otherwise.”

She bit her lip when she was done, for she had not known all of that was within her, but Arwen’s eyes were on her, deep and dark yet full of light, and she smiling, unafraid of the importance of the mantle that Tauriel had just placed upon her.

“Do you think my light warm?” she asked, her voice quiet, almost reverent. “I have always been afraid that it is quite dreadfully cold.”

Tauriel shook her head, her hair moving gently around her.

“Not once have I thought that,” she said, quietly, leaning down to touch the frond of a particularly persistent sea-plant that had wrapped itself affectionately around Tauriel’s ankle, and was refusing now to let go. “Not once.”

Arwen smiled, a small and sad thing then, before her eye was caught by the glitter of a particular crystal, and she moved over to inspect the glowing blue that was inside it. Tauriel did not know what it was, and perhaps Arwen understood that there were some things that not even they would know, for she did not ask.

“It seems so strange to see you here, when I have watched you for so long,” Tauriel said, as Arwen’s hands moved gently across the stone.

“You have, then?” Arwen answered, her face breaking into a smile, a real smile this one, the grief that had lingered around her features a moment ago leaving all of a sudden. “I wondered, whenever I watched you dance through the waters of the world, if ever you looked upwards.”

“I’m afraid to admit that I look upwards far more often than I should do,” Tauriel replied, looking away. “I think I spend more time staring at the skies than I do at the sand at my own feet.”

“Well,” Arwen said, her fingers brushing against Tauriel’s. “I suppose we are evenly matched then, for I spend far longer watching the ripples of the tides than I do listening to the stars that surround me.”

She laughed then, bright and beautiful, as she danced across the sand, stirring gold up around her feet.

“Your laughter is like light,” Tauriel whispered, but she wasn’t sure if Arwen even heard her.

“I feel so free,” Arwen said, all of a sudden, just as the plants began to lean towards her, their shyness finally abating. She was smiling as she said, her face a symphony of silver and gold, her hair streaming around her, bringing star-light to this little corner of the sea.

“Are you not?”

But that melancholy fell across her face once more, for just a moment, until it was broken by the touch of a particularly bold plant, which had finally worked up the nerve to touch her glowing skin. There, in this most intimate place in Tauriel’s life, she floated as if made of light, the long line of her dark raiment caught by the water, bearing her legs, the elegant line of her arms moving her slowly through the water, turning to inspect first one thing then another, caught entirely by the beauty of it all. She fit her, Tauriel could not help but think, amongst the gold and crystal and miracle that still filtered through the water, as incredible a thing as Tauriel could ever remember seeing.

“My lady,” she began, but Arwen cut her off, before she had a chance to find words for anything that she was feeling.

“Why do you call me that, when my name is Arwen?”

“When I look at you I see the glory of the skies, an eternity of light, and all that seems graceful and good in the world, no matter what realm. I suppose to call you anything else seems quite wrong, though I’m not sure I could explain how. But if you would prefer me to call your by your name then I shall do so, for all that it might seem odd to me at first.”

She wasn’t sure where the words had come from, not really, but they felt right, so she did not try to bring them back, did not try to correct herself. Arwen did not seem to know what to do with words such as those, but she nodded, just a little.

“I would prefer Arwen, if it is all the same,” she answered, in the end. “I have been on a pedestal for far too long.”

She looked tired, all of a sudden, and Tauriel remember the struggle this must be for a god used to never having to carry their own weight. She had done remarkably, but it seemed that finally she was flagging, and as if she herself had realised this the light in her skin seemed to dim, just a little.

“Do you need to rest?” Tauriel asked, and Arwen did not answer, though there was a discomfort about her eyes even as she lowered, just a little, in the water.  

“There is no shame in admitting it,” she told the other goddess as she held a hand to Arwen, drawing her close and propelling them out of the cove, through the waters, carrying most of Arwen’s weight as they moved towards the surface, towards a small island that as of yet no man had found. It was a place she often took respite herself, being just a small jut of sand and stone far removed from anywhere, where she could rest without concern of being spotted by any overly curious mortal.

And there she drew the beach to the shore, settling herself in the sand at the waters edge so that it lapped continuously around her legs, leaning back in the early morning light, her hair a fan around her. Arwen settled herself too, and to Tauriel’s surprise she did not sit further up the sand, but right beside her, even though it meant her sitting in the water, too.

 

* * *

 

Arwen was silent for a long time, still thinking of all that she had seen and felt this day that might have been years for all that she felt changed from it.

“Your world is a wonderful one,” she said, in the end, casting her eyes upwards the pale stretch of morning sky above them, where a faint sliver of the moon could still be seen, almost ghostly against the sky. Is that not how she had felt for so long, she thought, wondering at the sight – perhaps it was more obvious down here than it was up there, where the moon was never-changing. A ghost, only half-living, waiting for something to come along to bring her to life.

“Yours must be wonderful too,” Tauriel said, her voice a little careful, as if she could sense the melancholy that still held on to Arwen, final shreds of it, a raiment still in the process of being cast off. It would take so long to change, Arwen had always known that about herself, yet down here it seemed to happen so much more quickly. Nothing was permanent here, and that in and of itself seemed so much freer than anything she had ever known.

“It is,” she said, suddenly realising that she had not answered Tauriel’s question. “But very different. I should like for you to see it, some time.”

“Well,” Tauriel said, with a small smile. “I should like that too, but of course the gods of the earth and sea cannot pass into the skies, and though there are stories of those who can pass to the celestial realm smuggling across those who are not blessed with their freedom, I would not want you to get in trouble for me.”

There was a soft humour to her voice, and her eyes flicked to the sea then back again to the sky as Arwen watched her.

“Besides,” she said, after a moment. “The stars and the moon and the sun are beautiful enough from here. I loved you from the sea-shores, when all I could see was the barest shadow of who you are, passing so far above me that it felt as if you should always be out of reach. And yet here you are, alongside me now, so perhaps one day the stars too will fall to the oceans, and then I might know them, too.”

She said it with such fearlessness that Arwen felt something hot and bright within her, something warm, and oh, how long she had longed for warmth.

“I loved you from the skies,” she replied, finding a strength within herself to say those words, a strength that she had not known that she possessed. “I loved you when all I could see was the way that you moved, and the flicker of your hair. And now I am beside you I feel that all there is down here is so much _more_ than I could have imagined. Perhaps one day those up above us will realise that too, and the stars will fall of their own violation, to learn what it is to truly be alive.”

Tauriel’s smile, at that, was a wonderful thing, and she did not reply, turning her eyes once more to the distance, to the world spread out before them, possibilities endless, time stretching between them like a living thing, theirs to play with, to do what they would with. And all of a sudden Arwen felt within herself a well of potential, of all that might be and all that she might make it to be, and she realised that it was this that she had always been missing: this knowledge that she could change, that she could make this life whatever she wanted it to be, that the future was not a static thing, but something that might be _anything._

And oh, what a terrifying thought, and what a glorious one too.

“You said what you see when you look at me,” Arwen said, breaking the silence. Her eyes were fixed on the movement of the waves, her dark hair still dripping water down her shoulders, though she did not seem to care. “But when I look at you, I see the beautiful of freedom, the wildness of the uncharted places of all the realms, and in that wilderness I see the strength of remaining untamed, unshackled – I see so much strength, and so much wonder. I have longed, for the longest time, to know you, and now that I do I see only all that I still have to learn about you. I had thought that meeting you would explain it all to me, but I find myself feeling all the more ignorant, for now I have seen just how much there is about you that I do not know, that I may never know.”

She broke off, breathing a little hard, wondering where those words had come from.

“All that there is of me,” Tauriel replied, a little uncertain, “Is yours to discover.”

“As is mine,” Arwen answered, and Tauriel smiled, just a little, before they lapsed into silence.

Time passes differently for immortals than for man: they sat for what only felt like minutes to them, there on the sand, as the day grew brighter, Galadriel’s glory shining down on them, warming the sand around them, bringing the gold in Arwen’s skin all the brighter, lighting the sea-green in Tauriel’s eyes so they glinted like sun-spots on the water. All around them the world moved on, another day passing in its own quiet way as they sat together, close enough that it might have seemed as if they were touching, from anyone who passed by. Above the gulls sang a lonely chorus, but neither felt those calls echo within them: there was no loneliness within them, not in this moment. And the day passed overhead, the sun sinking once more beyond the horizon, and as the moon appeared in the sky Arwen felt an ache within her, a knowing that soon she must return home, if only for a brief time, to make sure that all was in order – after all, this was her purpose, and she found that she did not resent its call, not now.

The night was soft and cool around them, the beach still warm from the day, and it seemed strange to her that she had only been here for a day, when it seemed to her that it had been so much more.

“Will you come back?” Tauriel asked, all of a sudden, her voice almost desperately, and Arwen realised that she must have seen the ache within her, urging her to return home once more, to take her place amongst the stars without chaining herself to the sky. Tauriel must have seen the way that her gaze had been turning more and more to the moon rising in her sky, her fingers reaching upwards now and again, as if trying to touch something that would always remain out of reach down here. Tauriel had seen it all, and as she turned to look at her Arwen saw pain in her eyes, and realised that Tauriel had misunderstood those movements, those glances.

She smiled, and laughed a little in wonder at it all, star-eyes brighter than perhaps they had ever been before.

“I doubt there is anything in the sea or sky that could keep me from doing so,” she answered, her voice whisper-soft but strong with determination.

And Tauriel, in turn, smiled too, and took Arwen’s hand in hers, her eyes on the moon, whilst Arwen’s turned to the glorious stretch of the sea before them, the chill of the water lapping around her legs, feeling, for perhaps the first time, as if she truly belonged.

 

* * *

 

The tide finds a pace, in the end, levels out into a set routine that allows its mistress time for her own. The moon too settles into a speed that does not waver, that remains the same no matter the time or the year. There is comfort in this, the men of the earth think: they know what to expect now, and when to expect it. It is easier for them to track the length of the night, the times to set their boats to the courses of the sea, and when to return again.

It is not for them, though they do not know this. The rhythm of both have been set without consideration of mankind: it is coincidence alone that means it works out better for them.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://northerntrash.tumblr.com)!


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